The West Virginia Legislature created the State Colored
Tuberculosis Sanitarium in 1917. The Maryland Lumber Company sold
185 acres of land and numerous buildings in Denmar, Pocahontas
County, to the West Virginia Board of Control. According to the
1918 West Virginia Legislative Hand Book, black tuberculosis
patients, who were West Virginia residents, were eligible for
admission to the sanitarium provided they could pay for their care.
The Hand Book noted: "The reasonable expenses of poor
persons admitted at the request of the authorities of any municipal
corporation or county, shall be paid by such municipal corporation
or county." The sanitarium admitted its first patients on January
31, 1919.

In 1937 the legislature appropriated funds for a new hospital
building at Denmar, which was completed in 1939. By the 1950s,
medical science had developed more effective means to diagnose and
treat tuberculosis and, in 1957, Denmar was converted to a state
hospital for the chronically ill. The hospital closed in 1990 and
the legislature appropriated funds for its conversion to the Denmar
Correctional Center in 1993.

In 1995 Warden Stephen Yardley and his staff at the Denmar
Correctional Center compiled a list of 277 names of sanitarium
patients believed to be buried on site. William P. McNeel and
members of the Pocahontas County Historical Society scoured the
county death records from 1923 to 1946 and made many corrections
and additions to the original list. Staff at the West Virginia
State Archives conducted a search of the state death records from
1919 to 1946 and discovered several hundred names that did not
appear in either hospital or county records. The following lists
were compiled from these sources-hospital records, Pocahontas
County death records, and state death records. The first records
those who are known to be buried at Denmar. The second, taken from
county and state records, lists those who died at Denmar but were
buried elsewhere or whose burial places are not known. These lists
do not represent a verbatim transcription of any of the records
used. In some cases, place names have been corrected.

Some interesting patterns emerge from these lists. Many of the
patients originally came from the South and may have been part of
the Great Migration of blacks to the North in the early twentieth
century. While all regions of West Virginia are represented, many
of the patients resided in the southern coalfields. This raises
questions about poor sanitary conditions in coal towns, which may
have contributed to the spread of tuberculosis. The large number of
miners at Denmar also raises speculation about the possibility of
black lung disease.

Burials at Denmar

The information for each patient in this list appears in the
following format:

Name - date of birth or age at death; place of birth; date of
death; occupation. Alternate spellings, dates, etc. found in the
Pocahontas County death records are enclosed in [brackets].
Alternate spellings, dates, etc. found in the West Virginia State
death records appear in bold face. An asterisk (*) indicates
information which was missing or not applicable.